WordPress Rocks the House

I am seriously falling in love with wordpress. It is hands down the best blogging platform out there, but I’m discovering that it’s pretty darn good as a general website design platform as well. I’ve had a couple of clients lately that I’ve built sites for based on wordpress, and it was really hard at first to convince them that I could build a “standard” website with it. They didn’t necessarily want a blog, but they wanted something that they could easily manipulate and add content to.

WordPress to the rescue! I explained to them that the blogging feature can really become secondary or not even exist if you don’t want it to. In wordpress, if you click on Options>>Reading you can set up the home page to be one of the subpages that you create instead of the blog itself. And that is exactly what I ended up doing for these last couple of sites.

Here they are:

Yenter.com is a Drilling and Blasting Company based in Colorado, and they really didn’t quite get the concept of how a blog could help them, but wanted to make quick changes to the site, and so wordpress ended up being perfect for them. Hopefully later down the road, they will see the benefits of the blog structure and will start using it, but until then, they have a great site structure to work with.

FocusOnCastleRock.com is kind of a pet project that I launched with my partner Jay under our company Searching Solutions. The basic idea was to create a site that could list all of the best businesses in our area. We transformed the comment section into a review section with a nice little star rating system, and opened up some categories for businesses to post promotions, coupons, events, etc. It came out great… and we were even able to add a forum for the town of Castle Rock with a cool plugin we found.

Anyway… I don’t usually write posts like this, but I’ve been so thrilled with wordpress lately. I’m no expert, but it’s been a blast building new sites on the platform and really getting some great functional results

Those are good example sites you have there. Yea WP can almost do anything a normal website can. Good for clients who are not internet savvy as well… hey, you’re template’s whacked! are you redesigning?

Those are good example sites you have there. Yea WP can almost do anything a normal website can. Good for clients who are not internet savvy as well… hey, you’re template’s whacked! are you redesigning?

Good points Justin. We, at phoenixhomes.com, moved our site onto Drupal at the beginning of 2007. I’m a big fan Drupal myself, and deeply convinced that Drupal framework can be used to build anything you want. I should admit that this is mostly for developers that have some programming knowledge of PHP. But I really never looked back.

In a few months after we re-developed phoenix homes we decided to move one of our Point2 sites onto a WP platform. That’s where we have our http://www.ScottsdaleHomes.com. The transition went very smooth and we’re pretty happy with our choices.

WordPress is great because it’s easy to use and a lot people already have experience using it. Also it’s easy to set up and re-design without a need for programming knowledge.

WordPress is the way of the future. Certain real estate web firms are basing their entire websites of wordpress blogs and the sites seem to be doing well. With all the plug ins available, you can pretty much get anything and do anything with wordpress!